Lost and Found:
One
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The Alliance thought Commander Shepard was gone. They were right. They expected to find a corpse. They were wrong. Do our memories make us who we are? Shepard/Garrus, post ME3.
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Disclaimer: This author in no way profits from the writing of this story. All characters, dialogue, or other referenced material from the Mass Effect trilogy belong to Bioware.
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She rode into consciousness on a wave of pain.
Her lips parted to let out a moan, but no sound emerged from her parched throat. With an effort she managed to crack open her eyes, finding the room mercifully dim. She could see little from her vantage point but an unremarkable ceiling and a faint blue glow coming from somewhere on her right. She tried to turn her head towards the light, but her efforts were rewarded only with pain.
Her heart sped up incrementally as she tested her other muscles. Her mind felt sluggish. Her body didn't respond to any of her attempts at movement. Was she bound, drugged, or injured? How did she get here? Was she in danger?
The blue glow shifted.
An asari, datapad in hand, leaned over her with a scowl. "Where's the damn doctor?" she snapped over her shoulder.
There was a distant reply, but she couldn't make out the words. Blood rushed in her ears. Her lungs burned. Everything felt strange, like floating and drowning all at once. She tried to speak, to protest, to move, but her body was unresponsive. All she could do was stare up at the asari, facial markings contorting in a frown. Something within her was telling her not to trust this woman.
The asari disappeared, replaced with a salarian. Soon she was drifting, her pain ebbing away along with her consciousness. She clawed at reality, but it slipped through her fingers, as elusive as the remnants of a dream.
She didn't know where she was or who her captors were, but there was one thought that solidified in the back of her mind.
She was supposed to be dead.
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The second time awareness came for her, it was not with the force of the tides but the gradual light of a sunrise.
This time, she turned her head.
Her eyes fell from that unremarkable ceiling to an unremarkable room, its single occupant watching her with critical eyes.
The asari flicked her eyes back to her datapad as if her waking patient was of no interest at all. "Nice of you to finally join us, Shepard," she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.
She stared at the asari uncomprehending. "Who the hell is Shepard?"
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She was Shepard.
The name itself was meaningless, until the asari began to explain what that name represented. She wove a tale of soldiers and monsters, a war—a woman—that united a galaxy. A smile played on her painted lips at Shepard's disbelief.
When she tired of answering questions, the asari left Shepard alone in bed, her mind a pain-blurred jumble of facts and questions.
Not memories, though. Never memories, just a black hole where her life was supposed to be. All inside her was darkness, and everything she knew came from the asari she could not trust.
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The asari's lackeys—even the doctor seemed to scramble to do her bidding—had told her they were on Earth. She knew what Earth was, but she didn't know how she'd gotten there or if she'd ever visited it before.
No sunshine came in the window, but no starlight either. Just the dull gray of clouds and smog, the still-burning fires of Earth, so they said. They said many things. They said she saved the galaxy, came within an inch of death, and had been in a coma for a matter of months.
Somehow, she found it difficult to believe anything they said.
Getting answers elsewhere didn't appear to be an option. She couldn't fight, she couldn't walk—she couldn't even sit up in bed on her own. She was as helpless as an infant, left to the mercy of this sarcastic asari and her skittish salarian doctor.
At least no one here had tried to kill her, she thought, but for the life of her she couldn't figure out why that seemed strange.
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A month into her recovery, she was taking slow walks through the house with the aid of a cane. She'd confirmed that it was indeed a house—she should know, having explored every inch of it—one that appeared to be on Earth according to the views outside the windows. She hadn't been outside herself. The doctor had forbade her going alone, and she was inexplicably uncomfortable accepting the offer made by one of the asari's batarian lackeys. She contented herself with the indoors and a litany of questions the asari occasionally deigned to answer.
Two months into her recovery, the extranet returned. She watched the news vids hungrily, taking in every scrap of the outside world. Her name came up often, the great hero Commander Shepard presumed killed in action. A galaxy mourned. She wondered if she should make herself known, but she still wasn't convinced about her identity in the first place. She certainly didn't think she looked much like the bright-eyed marine whose photo they showed on the vids. With her scars, shorn hair, and atrophied limbs, she looked more like a corpse than a soldier.
At three months she went outside on her own. After yet another meal of rations and long day of boredom, she asked the asari for some seeds to plant her own garden. The asari rolled her eyes, but when the next supply shuttle arrived, a bundle of garden tools arrived along with it. The gardening came to her naturally, though she didn't remember where she learned it. Or anything else, her mind whispered, but she tried not to think of that. Her legs ached and hands trembled, but each day of work ended with a sound night's rest, free of the strange and shapeless nightmares that usually plagued her sleep.
When she could, she wandered further, finding a nearby beach she liked to visit. Some days she would clean away the debris that washed onshore, others she would simply bask in whatever sunlight cut through the haze. In the distance she could spy the shadow of a dead reaper, its insect-like legs sticking up into the sky and filling her with strange, disquieting feelings. Sometimes she would sit on that beach and stare at the far silhouette, waiting for answers that never came.
In the twilight hours, someone would find her and bring her back, the house's windows glowing gold in the oncoming dusk. The asari would complain about the inconvenience, making idle threats about leaving Shepard to fend for herself. Shepard paid no mind to the asari's words. She was never gone long before someone came looking.
"Am I a prisoner here?" she had asked once.
The asari had simply laughed, and waved a hand towards the vidscreen. "You're safe here," she said.
Onscreen, the reporters were talking about her again. They said she was a soldier and a hero. She felt like neither. But sometimes, in the back of her mind, she felt a prickling sensation that she might rather trade her spade and trowel for something heavier.
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The news vids were always the same.
Riots, recovery projects, feel-good stories, speeches… she'd seen it all a hundred times if she'd seen it once.
But then there was something new, something that had her leaning forward in her chair. "That ship," she said urgently. "There's something…" She growled at her lack of memory. Her head throbbed. "I know that ship."
Her eyes were locked on the screen as crew disembarked the Normandy SR-2 to a hero's welcome in London. She followed their images eagerly, certain there was something there. She cursed the angle, the distance of the camera. If she could only see their faces…
The asari glanced up, surveying the vid expressionlessly. With a flick of her omni-tool she switched off the screen, ignoring Shepard's sounds of protest.
"Looks like I've got a message to send," she said, and swept out of the room like a queen.
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A/N: Thank you for reading! Please don't fear… the ending will be a happy one. Please let me know what you think and if you'd like to read more!
For anyone who's been reading Running Silent, I have not given up on the story. I will get back to it soon.